CHAPTER 34 LYRA

Chapter 34

LYRA

C himes sounded. The scoreboard reappeared on the screen. Beneath Lyra's team's symbol—the heart—the score remained the same. Beneath the diamond, the numeral 2 appeared.

"Two answers in one go," Lyra noted. "One of the other teams found the trick." There was always a trick, and Lyra and her team were missing it. They had been missing it.

Lyra looked down at the word magnets spread out on the floor in front of her. She'd had her way with it, her hands piecing together a poem that had led exactly nowhere, one she couldn't afford for anyone else to see.

She dashed her hand through the words.

"The only way another team gets two answers right at the same time," Lyra continued doggedly, pushing to her feet, "is if there's a pattern." She closed her eyes. "So what's the pattern?"

Silence , and then: "Persuasive, isn't she?" Odette said.

A full five seconds passed before Grayson replied. "Unexpectedly so."

He'd spoken those words from the floor. Lyra's eyes flew open. Grayson was kneeling, with one knee down and one raised, over the poetry magnets and the poem that he had—seemingly effortlessly—pieced back together.

Lyra cursed herself. And the room they were locked in. And him. Mostly him.

Grayson stood. Lyra thought for one horrendous moment that he was going to look at her, but he turned his attention to the scoreboard instead. "For the past year or two," Grayson said, his cadence slow and deliberate, "there is something that I have been working on. Practicing."

"And what is that?" Lyra asked, doing what she thought was a pretty good impression of someone who wasn't burning with the profound desire to launch herself head-first into the sun.

"Being wrong," Grayson said.

"You have to practice being wrong?" Lyra considered the merits of launching him into the sun instead.

"Some people can make mistakes, make amends, and move on." Grayson kept right on looking at the scoreboard. "And some of us live with each and every mistake we make carved into us, into hollow places we don't know how to fill."

Lyra hadn't been expecting that. Not from him. She knew the hollow places all too well.

"Growing up," Grayson continued, "I was not allowed to make mistakes the way my brothers were. I was supposed to be his heir. I was held to a higher standard."

His. Grayson's meaning was very clear. Tobias Hawthorne's. Lyra managed to recover her voice. "Your grandfather left everything to a stranger."

"And now," Grayson replied evenly, "I practice being wrong." He took a step toward her. "I was wrong, Lyra."

She hadn't ever let herself even imagine him saying those words, not once in the year and a half since she'd heard the arctic chill in his voice. Stop calling.

"I was wrong," Grayson said again. He finally looked away from the scoreboard. His Adam's apple bobbed. "About the nature of this puzzle."

The puzzle. He was talking about the puzzle .

"I assumed that this challenge would unfold sequentially, one clue leading to the next, each object with its own use. However. " Grayson gave that one word the weight of a whole sentence. "Your logic is sound, Ms. Kane."

Was that his version of a compliment? Your logic is sound? He'd read that poem, and it had inspired in him the sudden realization that her logic was sound ? Forget the sun. Lyra could think of better ways to end Grayson Hawthorne.

"Two correct answers in quick succession," he continued, unaware that she was plotting his demise, "indeed suggests the answers are themselves connected. There is a pattern—or a code."

Odette looked from Lyra to Grayson then back again. "As I said earlier," the old woman told Lyra. "Very much a Hawthorne."

That sounded a lot less like a compliment than it had before. Lyra narrowed her eyes. "How did you say you knew Tobias Hawthorne again?"

"I didn't. And my earlier terms still stand." Odette lifted the jeweled object in her hands— a pair of opera glasses —to her face. "I won't answer that question unless and until all three of us make it out and down to the dock by sunrise." Odette peered through the opera glasses at their array of objects, then lowered the glasses. "Nothing. But it was worth a shot." The old woman cheated her gaze toward Lyra. "I don't suppose you found anything useful out on the island?"

If Odette had been the one to plant those notes, then she was still playing mind games. If she hadn't, then she was fishing.

"I found an Abraham Lincoln quote with the word escape in it." Lyra took in every aspect of Odette's expression, preparing to track even the most subtle shift. "And then there were the notes. Thomas, Thomas, Tommaso, Tomás. "

Odette had very few wrinkles for a woman her age. She also had an excellent poker face. "And the significance to those names…"

"Your father?" Grayson's tone called to mind the hardening of a jaw and the ticking of a rather foreboding muscle near the mouth, but Lyra kept her eyes focused on Odette.

"My biological father was a man of many names." Lyra kept her voice perfectly even, perfectly controlled. "My mother first knew him as Tomás."

Odette took in Lyra's features. "Puerto Rican? Cuban?"

"I don't know," Lyra said. "By the time my mom was pregnant with me, she'd heard him tell business associates a dozen different stories about his background. He'd claim to be Greek or Italian one day, Brazilian the next. He was always working a new hustle. Big ideas . That was how my mom described him." Lyra expelled a breath. "Not so big on telling the truth or keeping promises. She left him when I was three days old."

Lyra had no memories of the man, other than the memory.

"Am I to understand that someone on this island left you notes with a variety of your father's aliases written on them?" Grayson's voice was edged, each word precise and as sharp as the tip of a knife.

"Rohan seemed to think it wasn't your brothers or Avery." Lyra finally looked away from Odette but spared herself from looking directly at Grayson.

"I assure you," Grayson replied, "it was not."

"And I assure you both," Odette cut in, "that I am not a person who has to resort to parlor tricks or dramatics to win." She smiled like a cookie-baking grandmother. "Now, rather than assuming facts not in evidence about my intentions and character, perhaps you two could join me in looking for that elusive pattern?"

Pushing her long, gray hair back over her shoulder, Odette lined their objects up one by one. Lyra welcomed the distraction—and then she had to remind herself that the game wasn't the distraction.

The game was the point. It was why she was here.

Lyra picked up one of the quarters and studied it. 1991. She thought back to her exchange with Grayson about the years. Numbers, at least, were safe. Numbers were predictable. And these numbers had a pattern.

1991. 2002. 2020.

Lyra looked to the Scrabble tiles, the poetry magnets, and all the rest of it. Taking another large mental step back from the Great Room and its occupants, she thought about multiple-choice tests and trick questions, about working backward, deriving clues from the answers.

Or in this case, the answer, singular, that they'd been given. SWORD.

If there was a pattern to all three answers, then maybe Grayson hadn't been entirely wrong about the puzzle. Maybe SWORD was indeed a clue, just not the linear kind he was used to. Lyra turned that over in her mind. What if, having been given one of the answers, what we've really been given is a means of decoding the other two?

"Sword." Lyra said it out loud as she pulled four letters from the Scrabble letter bank— W , O , R , and D . There was no S , so she drew it with her finger.

And then she realized…

SWORD. Lyra moved her hand from the beginning of the word to the end, drawing the S once more. And just like that, SWORD became WORDS .

"An anagram." Grayson was suddenly right there beside her. "Like the dates on the quarters."

"The magnets, Scrabble…" Lyra said, thinking out loud. "They're words ."

This, she could do. This was so much easier than anything else having to do with Grayson Hawthorne.

"Our one and only correct answer," Lyra continued, "is an anagram of a word that describes two of the objects in our set."

Grayson swept the Scrabble tiles and magnet poetry to the side and focused wholly and completely on the remaining objects. "The plate," he said urgently.

Lightning tore through Lyra's brain. "And the petal."

"Two objects." The intensity radiating off Grayson's body came out in his tone. "Each an anagram of the other."

"Is there another anagram?" Lyra matched that intensity. "Same five letters. Plate . Petal ."

Odette moved with impressive speed for a woman her age. She made it to the screen and began to type. "P-L-E-A-T."

Pleat. The screen flashed green, and a chime sounded—another correct answer.

Lyra and Grayson looked back down at their remaining objects. The velvet pouch . The poetry box. The quarters —and the paper they'd been rolled in. The Sonic cup .

Lightning struck Lyra again. " Sonic ," she whispered.

"And coins ," Grayson finished.

Sonic and coins and…

" Scion ," Lyra breathed. Grayson said it, too, the same word at the same time, his voice low and clear, hers husky, their tones blending together in a moment so intense that Lyra could feel it, like a fire burning inside her, like a hollow place suddenly filled.

Odette entered the answer. There was a flash of green, a chime, and then bells, an entire melody's worth.

They'd gotten all three answers. They'd solved the puzzle. And as much as Lyra tried to keep herself firmly grounded, she felt like she was standing on the peak of a mountain. She felt untouchable, like nothing could hurt her.

A section of the mazelike wall dropped, revealing a hidden compartment exactly where Odette had said there would be one. Inside that compartment, there was an object. Lyra reached for it before she'd even processed what it was.

A sword. The hilt was simple but beautifully made, gold at the ends, silver for the grip. Lyra closed her hand around the hilt and pulled the sword from the compartment. The action triggered something, and a larger section of the wall began to part, revealing…

A doorway.

"You know how to hold a sword." Grayson was looking at her in the oddest way—like she'd surprised him, and his highness wasn't quite sure how he felt about surprises.

"My mother's a writer," Lyra replied. "Her books can be kind of stabby. Sometimes she needs help blocking out fight scenes."

"You're close to her." There was something… not soft , exactly, but tender and deep about the way Grayson said that. "Your mother."

Another second passed, and he turned and gestured—gallantly, of course—toward the now-open passageway. For the first time, Lyra noticed how old-fashioned the tuxedo he was wearing was, like it had been lifted straight from another era, like he had.

"After you," Grayson said.

"No." Lyra gave the sword a test swing. "After you."